I’m interested in connecting with more people who are interested in self-motivation and willpower, so I’ve begun to make a more concerted search on the Web for people who write personal blogs on subjects like organization, changing habits, weight loss, writing, difficult personal projects, better working habits, addiction, quitting smoking, exercise, improving personal relationship skills, and anything else where self-motivation or willpower play a big part, so that I can invite people to guest blog here and/or offer guest blog posts for their sites.

Any suggestions for me of people I should approach, blogs I should read, or places where a guest post from me (whether on a particular requested subject or not) would be welcome? One thing that I’d particularly love to be able to have here from time to time is posts from people who have achieved goals or made changes in habits, describing what they did, what challenges they faced, and how things went–but I’m also interested in many other kinds of posts.

You can contact me through the contact form on the right (just scroll down to find it) or by commenting here.

We tend to think of “wanting” and “liking” as being closely related: if we want something, then we will necessarily like it when we get it, and if we like something, then we will feel moved to action–or so the thinking goes.

People have been known to do some interesting things using this assumption, for instance working very hard to get somewhere in life, and then not liking where they are when they get there, or bingeing on a particular food and not enjoying a single bite.

gremlins: the real root of the problem?

So what’s going on here? Are we not enjoying things because we aren’t paying attention? Is it ennui? Are gremlins somehow involved?

The root of this matter is that liking and wanting are separate systems in the brain. Under normal, healthy circumstances, they’re pretty closely related: there’s a good chance that getting something we want will give us feelings of pleasure. But there are situations where they’re actually at odds with each other: the more we want something, the less pleasure it will give us when we get it. This is true of drug addiction, but also true of many other habitual behaviors, like overeating, compulsive shopping, and video game obsession.

The logical thing to assume (you would think) would be that people who overeat enjoy food more than people who don’t, and that’s why they overeat; or that people who max out their credit cards with unnecessary purchases enjoy getting a new pair of shoes a lot more than people who stay within their budgets. Yet when someone does something to excess, it often doesn’t look like they’re enjoying it more–it just looks like they’re more compelled–they want it more, but they don’t like it more.

And in fact, much of the brain chemistry of doing things to excess is the same whether we’re talking about watching too much TV or eating too many doughnuts or drinking too much coffee or shooting heroin: the more we overdo something, the less our brain reacts to dopamine release when we have that thing. Dopamine is a brain chemical that tends to make us feel calm and satisfied, and its normal purpose is to remind us to do things like eat and procreate, because if dopamine levels are low (as when we don’t do things we’ve evolved to want to do), we feel agitated. Doing too much of something makes our brain less receptive to dopamine, which means we require more of that thing to feel comfortable and happy. To someone who doesn’t drink much alcohol, one beer can be very satisfying–but to an alcoholic, one beer is barely noticeable.

There are at least two other reasons that we might want something we don’t like. First, there’s habit: if we do something very regularly, regardless of whether it makes us happy or not, our brains have reinforced the neurons devoted to that activity, and we will feel strongly inclined to keep doing it even if it doesn’t provide us any enjoyment or benefit.

And second, there are the broken ideas I’ve written about here before (more formally called “cognitive distortions”). These are things we tell ourselves that contain some kind of basic flaw. For instance, deciding that someone is a jerk and shouldn’t act toward us as they do can make us act unkindly toward that person, which can contribute to an increasingly aggravating relationship.

And what about not wanting things we do like? This is the effect of broken ideas again. For instance, we might have a task in front of us that seems very difficult,and think “There’s no way I can ever finish that, and it would be painful and awful to try”–when in fact, just getting started on the task can begin to relieve stress, and enough determination can get the entire task done, which can then deliver great benefits. Take for example cleaning out a room in the house that has long served as a “junk room.” Avoiding the junk room can be a continuing source of low-level stress, while getting it cleaned out can be very rewarding (especially after turning it into that home knitting studio we’ve been dreaming of having). Yet do we say to ourselves “Wow, I’m really excited to get that junk room cleaned out”? Not usually.

the junk room: shouldn't this be the kind of thing we can't wait to tackle?

Given these insights, that wanting and liking are not always in step with each other, what do we do about it? The simple answer is that we’re happier when we 1) question our wants and 2) remind ourselves of what actually makes us happy.  If an incident with a coworker makes you want to march into that person’s office and deliver a scathing review of their personal failings, it can be useful to think about whether you’ll really be happy doing that, or might ultimately be happier if you decide to calmly explaining what you didn’t like about the incident (maybe after a suitable cooling-off period). If you’re staring at a menu and feel inexorably drawn toward the buttered onion rings with fat sauce, it may be worth thinking about whether the minute or two that you are really enjoying those onion rings (after the first few bites, our enjoyment of food sometimes drops considerably) is going to be worth the over-full, sleepy feeling you’ll get soon after you eat them and the quarter pound heavier you’ll be as a result. Putting things in this kind of perspective can make doing things you’ll actually like much easier, bringing wanting and liking more in line.

Gremlin illustration by ibtrav
Junk room photo by Steve Jenkins

Imagine it’s morning, and you’ve got a few minutes when you can really relax. Maybe you’re just sitting down with a cup of coffee, or your commuter train has left the station and you’ve got your headphones on, or hell, I don’t know, you’re taking a short break before work to sit in the dark with your collection of antique textiles. The point is, here is a time when your mind can be serene and undisturbed. It’s a perfect time to motivate yourself–just not a perfect time to actually  do anything.

This means you have an opportunity for some motivational groundwork–visualization, for instance–that can make good decisions during the rest of your day easier and more enjoyable, because most of the time when we actually need to motivate ourselves, serenity and lack of distractions are hard to come by.

Now, you may be thinking of visualization as one of those flaky pseudo-spiritual things where you tell yourself things that aren’t true or visualize money sneaking out of people’s wallets to come stay with you, its true master. Those are emphatically not the kind of visualizations I’m talking about. So what kind am I talking about? Daydreams, dear reader. Sitting there are making yourself happy by picturing a situation you might be able to get yourself into in the future. For instance, you might picture yourself burning a copy of your mortgage (because it’s completely paid off, not because your heat has been shut off), or doing a job you would love that you aren’t yet qualified for, or accomplishing amazing acts of physical fitness.

You might also be thinking “Forget that! I don’t want to spend the one serene moment of my morning slaving away on mental improvement!” But why not? Visualizing your goals is an exceptionally pleasant way to spend time. What’s more serene than daydreaming that something wonderful has happened (apart from reflecting on something wonderful that has already happened, that is)?

The glories of visualization are threefold: first, you can do it at any convenient point in your day. Second, the better you visualize the thing, the more enjoyable it is. And third, visualizing things makes it a lot easier to be motivated to accomplish them.

After all, if you’re trying to get your finances on track and have a choice of spending $38 on an attractive geegaw or not, it’s a lot easier to feel good about not spending the money if you can easily associate that decision with something pleasurable, like the image (still fresh in your mind from visualization earlier that day) of you paying off the last dollar of your credit card debt and being able to tweet “Debt free at last, debt free at last!”

The expression “you have to see it to believe it” applies here. If we aren’t picturing the futures we’re trying to create, they have only a weak and theoretical pull on us. The more time we spend in those futures, reminding ourselves of why we’re trying to shake ourselves of problem habits or to take difficult steps that will really help us, the more naturally motivated we’ll feel to actually follow through.

For effective visualization, honestly try to do it every day. Leave yourself a reminder in the spot where you’d be most likely to have time to do a little visualizing, if that helps. And if you experience an odd sense of déjà vu when the wonderful things start happening, it’s a small price to pay.

Photo by *PaysImaginaire*.

My older sister, Su, was a mystery to me in one particular way for many years. Here’s the mystery: all the time we were growing up, Su had a modest weight problem that, I think, really bugged her. The year she graduated from college, she moved to New York City and took an administrative job at Cooking Light magazine (she has since moved up through the ranks to become an editor of a sister magazine).

Four or five years after Su moved to New York, there was a change in her: she started eating differently, getting more exercise, and from what I could see, thinking differently. I remember, for instance, how enthusiastic she was about a particular brand of popsicle that fit in really well with the kinds of meals she was planning.

And in due time, her weight problem was gone. Su became downright svelte–and has continued in an extremely healthy lifestyle ever since.

The great mystery to me was how Su became so powerfully motivated: she acquired focus, discipline, and enthusiasm for her goals that she hadn’t had before. This has always struck me as impressive, even a little heroic. How do people do that? I wondered for a long time. And although I learned what some of the pieces to that puzzle were and years later even made my own fitness transformation, for a long time it was just a hypothetical question. It didn’t occur to me for quite a while that there might be a real answer to it, if I broke the question down into its key elements.

But in doing research on a book project, it became clear to me that I needed an answer for this question, the question of how people become motivated to achieve what has always been beyond them in the past. And there must be an answer, because people like Su did it. So I started researching, and thinking, and taking notes, and rapidly pieces of the puzzle began to become clear, some of them pieces that I had already turned up over 8 years of reading and studying about cognitive psychology and related topics but just hadn’t realized had to do with self-motivation. Soon I decided I needed to put aside my previous book project for a while and instead begin shaping a book about self-motivation.

Each insight led me on to more clues, and I began investigating tangental subjects–neuropsychology, schema therapy, even body language–that yielded more answers. I began working systematically on my own self-motivation with goals that were important to me, and later began doing a little bit of coaching for friends who wanted to work on their own self-motivation.

And since I think about this subject every day, and am turning up more information than I’ll even be able to fit in that single book, I started this site.

This site is not about motivating others; that’s a different topic, a question of management and communication and strategy and interpersonal relations. And it’s not about inspiration. There are any number of people who can offer inspiration or experiences that will charge us up for a day or a week, to help give a motivational push.

Instead, this site is about the specific mechanics behind how we become motivated, and about what specific techniques we can use to make those mechanics work in our favor. It draws on many books, on psychological studies, on personal experience, on my coaching work, and on my discussions with other people about their own lives. And because I hope to show the inner workings of self-motivation, how the parts fit together, where the power comes from and how it’s transmitted, I’m calling this “The Willpower Engine.”

I’m always looking for comments: questions, ideas for research, contact from people who are interested in the subject, post suggestions, and so on. Willpower is a complex subject, but it’s one that’s well worth mastering, and for me, one that’s well worth talking to people about.